V-Word – Diana Reynolds Roome

What’s Wrong With Using the V Word?

Diana Reynolds Roome
Newsweek
January 24, 2000

Though I’ve lived in the United States for almost two decades, I still think like a European when it comes to vacations. It’s not just the yearning for Alpine and Mediterranean destinations but the fact that in Europe, for the most part, four weeks of paid vacation a year is mandatory and six weeks customary.

European friends report on their minor and major breaks which allow them to retreat with a stack of books to France, trek across Dartmoor on horseback and still get away to ski the Val-d’Isere. One London sportswriter repairs regularly to his house near the Pyrenees to eat saucissons and win local golf tournaments. Seven weeks’ respite allows him to return to work brimming with energy. In the United States, by contrast, employers seldom give more than 10 days’ paid vacation.

If my husband and I had settled in England (where I came from), we would by now have enjoyed a year and a half of additional free time. We taken a course on ancient Roman history—in Rome. There might have been time not only to create the garden I imagine, but to sit and bask in it. As things are, our plans will have to remain fantasies until retirement. By then, we may be too breathless to walk halfway up a Welsh mountain.

Ironically, it was my own European-scale vacation 20 years ago that allowed me enough time in California to get happily embroiled in a relationship that soon became a marriage. But that was the last of the big adventures. My husband, Charles, took 24 hours off for our honeymoon. When our two children were born, the company granted him one day each for purposes of bonding. Family leave did not exist then.

Weeks after our second child was born, we spent the remaining vacation allowance on a sad pilgrimage to England for my father’s funeral. We returned to the United States to find my father-in-law dying of heart disease. Over decades of hard work, he hardly took a long vacation until he allowed himself a few weeks in China. But he had left it too late, and the trip proved the final blow to his failing health. He refused to let Charles risk his job by taking more days off to be with him. When he died, there was barely time to mourn him.

It has been hard to break this habit of shortchanging our personal lives. I can count on one hand the number of vacations my family has taken together which lasted more than a week. As a freelancer, I have more flexibility with my time (if less money). As a full-time employee, I could barely have stayed in touch with my family and friends, or made sure our boys got to know the English half of their heritage.

Meanwhile, the effects of vacation starvation are all around me. For many people I know, 50 weeks of the year are used up in a blind struggle to get to work, retain a foothold and move upward. At home, essentials of family maintenance—paying bills, helping kids with homework—take up the little time left. There’s hardly a spare hour for pursuits that remind people they are more than corporate ciphers.

While our economy may be thriving, we are not. Marriages are starved of time. Children hardly ever see their parents unhurried and unharried. Anger, depression, exhaustion and stress-related illness are epidemic.

Yet the V word is almost never mentioned as a solution. Like sleep (another commodity we don’t get enough of), vacation is a remedy without harmful side effects. But because it’s considered an indulgence, it doesn’t fit well in our busier-than-thou culture. It’s fine to want more money, but there is something shameful about asking for more time. Anyone who fears the company can’t function without him is plagued by the equally insidious fear that it can.

Of course, the spirit of hard work is part of what has made America great. But there is another side to that coin. Americans, who consider themselves the freest people on earth, shackle themselves to their jobs, in the process giving up the most basic of human rights: time to be who they are.

John Steinbeck, who had a nose for injustice, pointed out that “we work too hard and many die under the strain.” Some die of heart attack or stroke. Others die from the slow wear-down that kills individuality and joy. Or it’s hope that dies–of ever spending enough time with the kids, or of having the adventure you promised yourself before you’re too old.

For me, what’s died is my belief in finding a balanced existence in the States. If time is our other great wealth, we can spend, invest, save and waste it. We can also be cheated of it–as I feel I’ve been when I hear about my European friends’ escapes. Imagining them from my little office, vacation seems less a ticket to paradise than the claim check to a parcel of lost life.

I can count on one hand the number of vacations my family has taken together which lasted more than a week.